Many companies use quality monitoring applications to record calls between customers and employees of the company. The recorded calls can be used to evaluate customer interactions for quality of service. For example, an evaluation form may be associated with a contact type and used to assess the agent's performance. Recordings may be saved for later verification of the transactions. Recordings may be archived for regulatory compliance. Quality monitoring of calls, therefore, serves many purposes.
Typically, company agents are located at a contact/call center where they handle calls from customers. Conventionally, many of the quality monitoring systems are based on telephony systems that use a time division multiplexed (TDM) infrastructure. In a TDM telephony system, a set of circuits interconnect a private branch exchange (PBX) to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). These circuits are called trunks and the interconnection is described as network side. Each trunk may handle one or more voice calls. All of the trunks terminate in one physical location, the PBX.
In a TDM infrastructure, all agents in a company's contact center typically have a physical circuit that interconnects their phones to the PBX. These circuits are called lines and the interconnection is described as station side. There is one line per agent and all of the lines terminate in one physical location, the PBX.
A PBX provides a central switching point in which customer calls enter a contact center and are routed to agents. Typical TDM approaches to voice call recording place one or more server computer(s) in the same location as the PBX. A recording device of the server has a number of voice ports that are interconnected with the PBX. The server may be interconnected either on the line side or the trunk side. Interconnecting on the trunk side allows recording of the conversation from the customer's perspective (i.e., includes all devices that the customer's call is routed through). Interconnecting a server on the station side allows for recording of agent conversations thus supporting agent evaluation. Recording solutions described here with regard to TDM infrastructures are referred to as legacy recording solutions.
When attempting to adapt legacy call recording solutions to a VoIP infrastructure there is a natural tendency to look for similarities between VoIP infrastructures and TDM infrastructures. Specifically, if a central point can be identified through which all customer calls can be routed to agents, then a legacy-type recording solution may be adapted to VoIP. A data network may be designed so that there is a common egress point to a call center. This requires that all VoIP conversations be routed through a set of network routers that are interconnected to a central Ethernet switch. The switch becomes the egress point for customers' calls. A recording server may be attached to the Ethernet switch on a port that is configured to receive a copy of the VoIP packets. This is commonly referred to as a switched port analyzer network (SPAN) port.
The server attached to the SPAN port acts as a network sniffer. The IP packets are sniffed off of the SPAN port and analyzed to determine which packets correspond to the VoIP calls (e.g., voice packets using real time protocol, RTP) and will be stored in a file system. A voice capture subsystem (VCS) is a component of a VoIP recording solution that captures the voice packets.
Many of the challenges in designing a quality monitoring system for VoIP networks are driven by the flexibility of the VoIP network topology. For example, in a VoIP environment, there is no requirement for a single ingress/egress point to an enterprise's employees. The enterprise's resources and employees may be geographically dispersed over multiple locations. In addition, any location may be an ingress/egress point for a customer's VoIP telephone calls. For example, a customer call may be routed from the PSTN to a voice gateway in the customer's local calling area, queued there and then routed to an enterprise's employee that is in the same geographical location, a facility at a corporation's headquarters, a facility overseas such as an off-shore outsourcer or a home office.
The absence of a single ingress/egress point imposes a number of limitations on a SPAN port adaptation of a legacy recording solution. The implementation of the legacy recording solution may require that a non-optimal approach to the routing of packets be implemented. For example, all VoIP packets may need to be routed from the edge to a core switch and back to the edge so that the voice capture subsystem (VCS) can see the real-time transport protocol (RTP) packets. One consequence of non-optimal routing is a dramatic increase of the network bandwidth required to support the call volume. This requires a customer to acquire additional switches and routers. Moreover, the challenge in placing a VCS server at a central site is further compounded because the VCS server may not be able to keep up with the network traffic that must be analyzed to identify the RTP packets. A data switch may support a larger number of ports that the number of ports that may be associated with a span port and processed in real time by the VCS server. This results in a potentially large number of VCS servers being required. An alternative architecture is to not modify the network routing of voice and data and allow multiple egress points. In this architecture the number of VCS servers is significantly larger. The increase in the number of VCS servers increases the capital acquisition cost in addition to the ongoing operating expenses.
As such, there are a number of challenges and inefficiencies created in adapting a legacy recording architecture to a VoIP infrastructure. For example, legacy-type recording solutions are unable to efficiently associate agent side activities or processing with points or events in a customer/agent conversation. Thus, it can be difficult to obtain a full view of the transaction. It is with respect to these and other problems that embodiments of the present invention have been made.